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The Eternal Hive

The late great Joe Sobran came up with the metaphor of the insect hive to describe the group behavior of various sorts of Progressives. It was a useful way of describing the spontaneous cooperation that has always been a feature of the Left. It is the dominant feature. Progressives will suddenly flock to an issue, all chanting the same lines and howling the same protests, as if they are a trained army of lunatics unleashed on the rest of society. It is a behavior that looks coordinated, but it is spontaneous and instinctive.

The most recent example of this was the reaction to the Dylann Roof shooting at the black church. All of sudden, as if commanded by a super villain from a secret lair, the nation’s Progressive loonies began chanting in unison about the Confederate battle flag. Even the sober minded had to wonder if this was not a planned effort, all setup and ready for the signal from HQ. Within a few hours we went from indifference to Confederate symbols to roving bands of lunatics toppling over statues and digging of Confederate graves.

Imagine the sort of person, who, upon hearing about a shooting, immediately thinks it is time to topple over a statue in their local park. What sort of person sees their coreligionists howling about something and then begins howling uncontrollably as well. Imagine what it is like to have no agency, in terms of how you react to public events. Presumably, there is something stimulating to the person who does this. Perhaps the swarm behavior releases endorphins, freeing the adherent from the torment of reality for a while.

It’s not an unimportant question. A generation ago, Progressives were programmed to swarm over economic issues. Socialism still provided the general framework of their imagined utopia, so they regularly launched into assaults on business, claiming to defend the interests of the working class. Yet, when socialism collapsed, Progressives quickly shifted from socialist utopianism to sexual and racial utopianism. The same people who used to put Darwin fish on their Subaru, now howl about scientific racism.

Sobran was correct to point out that Progressives have the same reaction to perceived threats as bees when they fear a threat. The resulting attacks are not indiscriminate, but they are excessive. The Progressive has a binary view of the world, where those inside are allies and those outside are enemies. In this regard, Progressivism functions like cult, where the focus of the adherents is always on a devil, real or imagined. The difference is, their devil is a shape-shifter, taking on new forms to fit every occasion.

It’s tempting to assume that a pattern must have some causal agent, some intelligent force behind it. It is the nature of man to confuse cause and purpose. In fact, this is why efforts to oppose the Progressive war on the American culture have always failed. The defenders assumed an intelligible purpose behind the actions of the Left so they invested their time in defeating those arguments. In reality, the cause of Progressive rage was always a biological response to what the groups has determined to be a threat to the hive.

Another way the Left functions like a hive is how individual members react to being cut off, even temporarily, from the hive. A lefty in a room full of people it perceives as hostile will become very passive. Reverse the roles and put a normal person in a room full of Progressives and they will attack him relentlessly. It’s why far left TV shows have a narrow, but loyal following. It is how the isolated Progressive can connect with the other members of the hive. These TV shows are the televangelists of the Left

This is probably why the Left has become obsessed with purging dissent from the Internet. Social media now supplements the pheromones used to synchronize behavior of the group. Twitter and FaceBook are becoming neural pathways for the hive, so that far flung members can pick up cues from other members. “Trending in Twitter” is becoming a way for Progressives to know what they are suppose to like and, more important, what they are supposed to hate. Right wingers on social media scramble the signal.

Even though observed patterns may not have a central control mechanism, they must have a cause. In the case of Progressives, it is clearly something biological. Even those who manage to leave the cult, never really lose the hive mindedness. Like reformed smokers, they usually direct this instinct to criticizing their former hive mates. You never see a former Progressive activist that is now disconnected from social causes, living a quiet life alone somewhere. When Lefty leave the hive, it is to serve another queen.

Most likely, this behavior traces back to the dawn of man. A deep, emotional commitment to the group would have evolutionary advantages. Status within the group would be higher for those who were most ferocious in defending the group. Well into the agricultural age, the leader of a people was often the most celebrated warrior. Perhaps this small group instinct manifests in a organized society, as a form of social fanaticism. In all times and all places, the reformer imagines himself protecting the weak from the strong.

Fanaticism, of course, has its utility to organized societies. The Greeks figured this out when observing that warriors were most ferocious when fighting on their own land. When advancing into foreign lands, they became more conservative. A focused, controllable fanatic is very useful in warfare. Similarly, organized religions can never have a shortage of those willing to risk it all to spread the good word. More than a few zealots ended up in the cannibal’s pot, but there were always more zealots ready to convert the cannibal.

This innate hive-like behavior of some elements of Western society has obviously not been a detriment to progress. The thing is though, there has always been a transcendent set of limiting principles, operating like a leash on the fanatic. Christianity, for all its faults, puts hard limits on what people can do to one another. When that is removed, the zealots are free to attack perceived enemies without restraint. Like Africanized honeybees, utopian socialists of various types slaughtered tens of millions they saw as threats.

The key insight of Sobran was that the hive-like behavior of the American Left was not caused by socialism or radical ideology. The causal relationship was the other way around. The hive-like behavior was a constant, a part of the American biology. When the socialist paradise collapsed, the Left switched to sexual and racial utopianism. That means when the current rage heads burn what’s left of society, only to not arrive at the promised land, they will find some new fantasy to embrace. The Hive is eternal.

There may be opportunists trying to gain control of the hive. That’s my current working theory: the hive is getting whipsawed as different entities attempt to take control of it. Since they can only influence the hive through the pheromone-like means you mention, the hive is especially agitated as different and sometimes conflicting waves of control propagate through it. I think that you may very well be right and that these are spontaneous phenomena instead and that the Internet and social media have removed all the loss and distortion in transmission, leading to these very high amplitude events. But given… Read more »

Along these lines….if Leftism is a biologically-based condition, is there a cure for it (that does not destroy the host)? Is there a treatment program, one that demonstrates a reasonable degree of success?

That’s rather amazing. I don’t think we are far from the news using fake images and fake video. They coach people to be interviewed at protests. How long before the news is running stories about the state rounding up Nazi subversives and showing video that was produced on a movie lot? I think there is a Philip K. Dick story to this effect.

We may already be there. Back when Obama was in office and there seemed to be serious talk about the US getting heavily involved in Syria – there were numerous stories popping up on the intarwebs about how the the latest “they gassed a baby!!” story to appear in the worldwide media – was a fake. I remember seeing some of these “Fake!!” articles and they had pretty extensive documentation about how the stories were faked. Given the high political stakes at the time – and the cloud people’s need to convince some hive behavior from the neocon dick licker… Read more »

They also use fake pictures. Look at the caption. “A teen was arrested Monday for making a homemade bomb and planting it at the Pine View High School, Utah. In this representational image, members of the riot police arrest a young man following clashes with demonstrators during a protest against police brutality, following the alleged rape of a black man in Paris, Feb. 23, 2017.”

Fortune favors the bold Leftist. The hive mind is very evident every time there is a mass shooting or terrorist event. The villains are tailor made for problem, reaction, solution. Sandy Hook-guns, gun control Boston bombing-jihadis, we must fight them over there so we don’t have to fight them here Los Angeles-misogynist, smash the patriarchy, gun control Charleston-racist, iconoclasm, gun control Pulse-homophobe, support for homosexuals, gun control Dallas police-BLM, support police, gun control, another conversation about police and racism San Bernardino-jihadis again Umpqua-jihadis again Las Vegas-guns again Parkland-guns again And so on. Wash, rinse, repeat. The solution is organized and… Read more »

The recent two minutes hate against the NRA certainly looked co-ordinated and planned. The whole thing went off like a well-oiled machine, with the only glitches being the astonishingly incompetent behavior of the EBI ans Sheriff Israel, and the refusal of most American gun owners to be intimidated.

It’s pretty obvious to me that this whole campaign was already in place, right down to the twitter talking points, and was only waiting, vulture-like, for the next mass shooting. Ghoulish in the extreme, but that’s the Left for you.

I concur re: appearance of pre-established anti-NRA coordination at the Parkland shooting. Many yrs ago I attended a very liberal/relatively wealthy community high school with lots of well-spoken kids who were used to being “on stage” as it were, with poise to spare, just like the Stoneman Douglas kids. On a spring day c. 1960 a bunch of these charmers ran out of the classrooms and lowered the American flag in the school courtyard because they heard that convicted rapist Caryl Chessman had just been executed at San Quentin, I think it was. These leftist students got in “trouble” for… Read more »

Yeah, I remember Chessman. He was a kidnapper and armed robber who savagely sodomized a 17 year old girl. If ever anyone deserved the death penalty, it was Chessman, so of course he became a hero to the Left. Alan Alda, Lord help us, even played him in a movie.

If the FBI and Sheriff Israel had not been astonishingly incompetent, the slaughter might not have
occurred, or at least might have been mitigated. One of the surviving heroes is suing the school district. Go figure.

We’ve been “lucky” in the sense that most of these incidents have highlighted the utter fecklessness of the leviathan state. So the edge of these preplanned responses is dulled as the facts roll out. Luck is not a strategy.

There seems to be more – much more – of this behavior on the left , but that may be just attributable to the fact that lefty talking points seem to get much more press in the current US social/political climate. I wouldn’t discount hive like behavior coming out of the right either. A previous post mentioned ISIS and jihadis. When we were seeing all the head chopping over in the Levant – and as terrorist incidents over here were getting attributed to ISIS – there was quite a bit of hive-similar behavior coming out of people who would describe… Read more »

Seems like this predictable behavior against the hive. First establish that you are a bad person — in some forum — then start making favorable comments about how reasonable some hive member is. Light fuse and retire…

I suspect this hive reaction is caused by most of its inhabitants being godless and having no answer for death. They are disturbed by it and have no vision how to combat it ( notice they have no utopian concepts regarding death) so when it is starkly thrust upon them on a large scale they get irrational, flaying their arms and legs in hopeless rage.
This country may be ripe for a revival.

The hive seekers are classic “r” selected rodents with short life spans, and low time preference, who are dominated by their emotions, especially fear. Their enemies are “k” selected survival oriented individualists with long time preferences, a devotion to reason and understanding reality.
Hence, attempting to reason with the hive mind is useless.

Once a cause has been identified (mentioned) it instantly becomes an amygdala stimulus for all lefties. Once the amygdala is triggered they must find a release valve. And hence they all wail at (nearly) the same time, over the same issue and demand the same “solution”.

On the right side this cannot happen. Righties are pretty resistant to amygdala stimulus. There thus is no need to wail and react at the same time.

Stefan Molyneux had a parent write in about her high schooler’s experience before and after Trump’s election.
The attack and ostracizing of him was pure bee hive protection.
The weeping and wailing in unison the day after his victory was just as hive minded.

“Environmentalism” has been around for quite a while. The true hive behavior these days is being displayed by global warming truth squad. No matter how hard it gets beaten down thru scientific fact or thru daily reality – it just keeps turning on a dime and coming up with another excuse. The real problem now is that they’ve beaten their drum so loudly and for so long – that the belief in “global warming” – or “global climate change” pretty much infests culture, society,and even business from top to bottom. I’ve leftism compared to a death cult a number of… Read more »

When the Left went all crazy about “net neutrality”, I took to asking them what “net neutrality” actually is—a definition of the term. All I got back was “the end of the net/our culture/the world as we know it”. It was obviously not about the issue at hand, it was all about the coordinated and manipulated agitation.

Excellent analysis. This also explains the progressive behavior in the deep state. No one had to tell Lois Lerner to single out tea party groups. The FBI, Justice Department and intelligence agency progressives all knew how to attack the Right, with no central coordination. Freed from any constraint to follow the constitution or laws by their “means justify the ends” beliefs, they picked up the hive signals and went to work. It was a massive conspiracy with no paper trail. Progressives believe the intuitive coordination is simply common sense, so they think we are nuts for seeing the conspiracy.

If there was no one or no thing to hate then the left would cease to exist. It’s whole existence is built on the negative. I don’t argue with liberals (a complete waste of time) I just tell them to fuck off, preferably right to their face. Has worked for me for nearly 60 years.

YES. Trying to argue with leftists becomes something that only ends up pissing YOU off. I finally learned my lesson a number of years ago – and now I carefully construct my arguments for making sure they’re maximally effective in pissing THEM off. Since lefties live on feelz – go for the jugular. Find the holes in their armor – and then insert words that will piss them off. This way you insert misery and pain into their lives – in the same way their control of the culture and of government is used constantly to insert pain into yours.… Read more »

Exactly. I think there’s a very good argument to be made that the hive like behavior has been an absolute detriment to progress. Are you trying to say that WW1 and WW2 were NOT a detriment? What else are these orgies of destruction except exhibitions of hive like suicidal behavior? Where would be today if WW1 had not helped hugely to destroy adherence to Christianity – and WW2 hadn’t made Communism pre-eminent across a large portion of Europe – and given the lefties here in the US a god to worship? Communism – which is another retarded baby of WW1.… Read more »

This is another, under-remarked benefit of religion — it gives born Pharisees something to get ostentatiously pharisiacal about. Back when W. Bush was Hitler, I half-jokingly suggested bringing back flagellant processions – they could do penance for America’s sins in front of the cameras, which is all they really want anyway, and the rest of us could get on with our lives. I’m not joking anymore.

Some thoughts: This hive mind is certainly a primary default setting in the human character; but what would we call its opposite … Individualism? Is this split a foundational structure in the LEFT – RIGHT working model we’ve used to make sense of political / ideological tensions these many decades? (NOTE: I do think the actual operant distinction is now vertical, not R-L or “horizontal, though it’s convenient still to catagorize it thus to allow us to talk about the ongoing conflict.) Can there be such a thing as a “conservative” or RIGHT-wing hive, or do the requirements of personal… Read more »

My vague familiarity with the Constitution, and the civics classes I took a long, long time ago, suggest that the Founding Fathers were quite familiar with the failings of humans, and sought to disperse power and ratchet up accountability as much as was reasonably possible. That we have utterly failed to hold up the Constitutional bargain is not their fault, but our own.

Certainly agree. They provided us the warning, and avenues for rectifying the problem, and the tools to get it done. However, we have yet to work together successfully on our side to counter their near-irresistable power. Absent organization, and an agreed-upon plan, we seem poised for extinction. Perhaps a dash of this hive behavior would do us well ….

Is is really wise to assume they were not at fault? The anti-Federalist dreaded the behemoth they saw germinating in Philadelphia. It took exactly seventy-two years for the Republic to change forms on a dime, to one nation, indivisible. Now pledge it after me, you fuckers: indivisible.

I think that they did the best they could in light of what they had just been through, and given the materials on hand. I don’t think they could have put into place the structures needed to keep human craziness in line. There were some things that they just couldn’t foresee. And they probably did about the best anyone could have done establishing this nation from a cold start. It would have been nice if they could have stood up some sort of irrevocable enforcement mechanism to militate against the intractable vileness and self-interest resident in the human makeup —… Read more »

They tried the Confederation first, which had a greater devolution of power to the individual states. The “re-do”, the Constitution, dialed back the powers of the states a bit, in favor of incrementally greater power to the central government. So they really “went for it”, back in the day, but found that a slightly less aggressive approach was necessary (or expedient) in the real world of that time, place, and culture.

Reports of the death of the socialist paradise have been greatly exaggerated. It’s taking a brief nap and will come back with new vigor to set upon new prey grown in the rows of social media cages. It’s not even sporting. The bees are not clever but the beekeeper is, and he loves his work.

J+W;
Yeah, the bee-keeper. I was thinking along the same lines. It’s almost as though there is some supernatural adversary with an implacable hatred of mankind and whatever institutions help us to thrive.

Z Man; The hive mentality is excellent description of Prog media (how Sobran mostly used it, I believe) : Field notes if you will. But the metaphor is a bit off for the current situation: After all, bees are pretty much theoretical libertarians – they’ll (mostly) leave you alone if you leave them alone. Fire ants are probably a more apt comparison. They are vicious, predatory and expansionary. They’ll take over your yard if you let them and sting, maybe kill, any pet (or kid) of yours that wanders near one of their ever-spreading nests. This matters because the main… Read more »

I agree with the fire ant analogy. Problem is – as you said: fire ants are predatory and expansionary. Both of these describe current day progressives – they’re definitely predatory thru the tax structure and in numerous other ways – even though they’ll tell you that they’re not. They’re also expansionary – as left wingers have always been. They expand by infesting and taking over previously established institutions and societies. They seem utterly incapable of building anything on their own. But – what they also “are” – is non reproducing. As we can see in the current birth rates across… Read more »

Hoffer is more relevant than ever… But on the topic of pheromones/social media. Spot on. Locally, we’ve got all these closed Facebook groups for Town residents. Since Trump’s election these have been infiltrated by “resisters” and transformed from “hey, who’s a good plumber” to the bat signal for the batshit crazy. Technically these are moderated for items of local relevance, but every local issue is reframed as “social justice”. Non-Resident kids in the school system?..racism (b/c of Trump). Organizing for the genitalia hat marches, Parkland protest (because you know THE existential threat to our kids is guns).. Dare say that… Read more »

You should watch the nature program on how Japanese honey bees manage to kill giant hornets. That very well describes the exact behavior of progressives on anyone that disagrees with them; they swarm around the hornet en mass, and then raise their collective temperatures and literally cook the hornet to death. It never ends well for the hornet.

excellent video herr Horst! Astounding that those bees could raise their temps so close to their own limits. I wonder if they swap in new bees, occasionally? Maybe this technique would work with muslims?

Hive behavior is an evolutionary adaption to environments in which food is abundant (think tropical jungle or vast fields of pollinating plants). Our present day affluence (and welfare policies) are the fuel that sustains and grows Progressivism. One practical way to roll this back is to change the environment. The hive mind is immune to discourse or persuasion when continued parasitism works just fine.

It seems that Bicameralism never really went away in humans https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bicameralism_(psychology), and that the Hive is really the portion of humanity still genetically prone to that condition and are not really fully consciousness. Jaynes hypothesizes that these bicameral humans have no conscious introspection to allow them to disobey appropriately constructed external directives, which are translated into a compelling internal hallucinatory drive. Applying this as a lens neatly explains the apparent uptake of ideas simultaneously, the relentless nature of these people, irrelevance of consequences and the profound lack of conception that their positions change even 180 degrees from one day to… Read more »

((That would mean the Sumerians weren’t completely destroyed by the “Angel with Swords of Fire” (vapor trails of the meteor strikes that pulverized Mesopotamia). Their terrible children, the surviving Habiru, simply kept on using the instinctive ticks that had served in the ancient world. They learned Narrative in fashioning an explanation for the wrath of the gods; their instinct for revision apparently reawakens much of the old wiring.)) El baboso gave us the secret for understanding “bicameralism”, and/or the oppositional binary split that occurs in all societies. Jayne and myself made the mistake of thinking it was related to the… Read more »

War is indeed the only option. You just need to look at history to see the conflict points with this part of the population. Europe (among others) has had many instances of spontaneous sect/rebellions through the ages based on utopian doctrines/movements which somehow acts as a compelling voice for these people. It usually resulted in the deaths of many and then respite until their numbers become enough to cause trouble again. Its just another one of those, but the ideas are rapidly transmitted, more widely intentionally molded and stronger than you would get through local prophets and written pamphlets. Seems… Read more »

Fascinating conversation. Just throwing it out there, because I have no real knowledge of the subject, just observations—do people fall easily into the insula/amyglyda “almond” part of their brains for guidance, because they believe their own frontal-dominant informational self is not up to the task of competing or keeping up with the peer group they find themselves in? My take is that people of lower IQ or social skills fall more easily into a tribal/emotional mental framework when they feel that they are intellectually or socially “out of their league”. It is their safe space when they can’t keep up.… Read more »

Jaynes suggests, and it seems very plausible to me,that here is no conscious introspection or reasoning at all in a brain like this, and that the condition is much more like schizophrenia with an internal commanding dialogue that speaks through the person, but is not mediated by a rational mind. Peterson touches on it when he talks about meme robots.

It is a different form of consciousnessness which you cannot apply rational models to.

Leftists/Progs/collectivists operate outside such concepts as honor, pride, cowardice, etc. Those are individual traits and they are not individuals; they are cells within a larger amorphous organism. People like you two — who continually mischaracterize the left — are why the left keeps on going.

You are right, there are two thoughts in the original comment, and I am only commenting on one of the items (“cowardice”). Always a mistake to try and interpret another culture through the lens of your own culture.

I’ve always referred to this crowd as liberal left-wingers but guess the new terminology is “Progressive’s”- so be it. They seem to share some traits with the Middle Eastern jihadist. The media provides a never-ending stream of propaganda and they self radicalize despite not belonging to any particular group or organization. Perfectly understandable since a lot of them share the same level of low intelligence as their middle eastern brethern. The puzzling part is speaking to Europeans with high levels of education. The hate President Trump all based entirely on liberal media. It seems acadamia no matter where in the… Read more »

Late in the day to comment, but I’m surprised that nobody has directly addressed the parallels to ‘crowd psychology’ or ‘mob psychology’. It seems obvious to me that we are witnessing virtual mob action. None of the information below is new or original to me. As with everything involving psychology, the subsidiary subject of mob/crowd psychology is over-intellectualized and politicized consistent with the neurotic hang-ups of its (mostly) leftist theoreticians. For a treatment full of the usual obfuscations and contradictions see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crowd_psychology. But the actual commie/collectivist practitioners of years past such as Lenin and Trotsky preferred Gustave Le Bon as… Read more »

The “Babylon Berlin” series currently on Netflix (1929 Berlin), shows this attempted manipulation of the crowds being attempted from a few different directions, even as the powers-that-be appear to be standing aside and just letting it all happen, for the most part. We all know where that went.

I tend to believe that the Hive response reflects their favored position with the media and other instruments of discourse and if conservatives were in a similar position they’d behave similarly. These people have a story they want to tell and the media and academia are in a symbiotic relationship with them in that public displays can be characterized as news thus justifying publicity and public displays give activists what they want in terms of message delivery. For the Left, a protest avoided is a message undelivered. For conservatives, public displays are rarely covered as news events so the sense… Read more »